Cisco Systems today introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform. "The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate," Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers said during a webcast announcing the product. At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, which was introduced in 2004. It also has more than 12 times the capacity of its nearest competitor, Chambers said.

Intel got its Pentium 4 processor clock speed up to 3.4GHz in 2004. Because nobody could work out how to make significantly faster CPUs without causing overheating and memory faults, Intel turned to dual cores - in effect, they cheated by loading two or more slower CPUs together to create a combined faster clock speed (e.g. Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz = "4.8Ghz" theoretically).

No single Intel core has gone much above the 3.4GHz clock speed - in essence, we've hit a physical limitation that hasn't been solved in six years.

Meanwhile, in the same time period Cisco has TRIPLED the throughput of its CRS router. To give you an idea of how expensive and difficult developing this type of carrier device is, take a look at Juniper Networks' competing T-series. From the time that the CRS-1 launched in 2004, it took Juniper another three years (until 2007) to get the T1600 model, which matches the earlier Cisco device's throughput, to market.